On reading A. N. Wilson's THE BOOK OF THE PEOPLE (2015 - see last article below), I felt I should start reviewing his other writings relating to religion, Christianity, Jesus, and faith — if nothing else, for the challenges they posited on belief and spirituality. I felt I could share some of his issues.
Here's an article by Wilson himself on how his conversion to atheism may have been similar to a road to Damascus experience, but his return to faith has been slow and doubting. He wrote it for The New Statesman in 2009...
A N Wilson: Why I believe again
A N Wilson writes on how his conversion to atheism may have been similar to a road to Damascus experience but his return to faith has been slow and doubting.
By nature a doubting Thomas, I should have distrusted the symptoms when I underwent a "conversion experience" 20 years ago. Something was happening which was out of character - the inner glow of complete certainty, the heady sense of being at one with the great tide of fellow non-believers. For my conversion experience was to atheism. There were several moments of epiphany, actually, but one of the most dramatic occurred in the pulpit of a church.
At St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London, there are two pulpits, and for some decades they have been used for lunchtime dialogues. I had just published a biography of
C S Lewis, and the rector of St Mary-le-Bow,
Victor Stock, asked me to participate in one such exchange of views.
Memory edits, and perhaps distorts, the highlights of the discussion. Memory says that while Father Stock was asking me about Lewis, I began to "testify", denouncing Lewis's muscular defence of religious belief. Much more to my taste, I said, had been the approach of the late Archbishop of Canterbury
Michael Ramsey, whose biography I had just read.
A young priest had been to see him in great distress, saying that he had lost his faith in God. Ramsey's reply was a long silence followed by a repetition of the mantra "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter". He told the priest to continue to worship Jesus in the Sacraments and that faith would return. "But!" exclaimed Father Stock. "That priest was me!"
Like many things said by this amusing man, it brought the house down. But something had taken a grip of me, and I was thinking (did I say it out loud?): "It bloody well does matter. Just struggling on like
Lord Tennyson ('and faintly trust the larger hope') is no good at all . . ."
I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis's
Mere Christianity made me a non-believer — not just in Lewis's version of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. On that occasion, I realised that after a lifetime of churchgoing, the whole house of cards had collapsed for me — the sense of God's presence in life, and the notion that there was any kind of God, let alone a merciful God, in this brutal, nasty world. As for Jesus having been the founder of Christianity, this idea seemed perfectly preposterous. In so far as we can discern anything about Jesus from the existing documents, he believed that the world was about to end, as did all the first Christians. So, how could he possibly have intended to start a new religion for Gentiles, let alone established a Church or instituted the Sacraments? It was a nonsense, together with the idea of a personal God, or a loving God in a suffering universe. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
It was such a relief to discard it all that, for months, I walked on air. At about this time, the Independent on Sunday sent me to interview
Dr Billy Graham, who was conducting a mission in Syracuse, New York State, prior to making one of his journeys to England. The pattern of these meetings was always the same. The old matinee idol spoke. The gospel choir sang some suitably affecting ditty, and then the converted made their way down the aisles to commit themselves to the new faith. Part of the glow was, surely, the knowledge that they were now part of a great fellowship of believers.
As a hesitant, doubting, religious man I'd never known how they felt. But, as a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were on offer. For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own generation. I had become like one of the Billy Grahamites, only in reverse. If I bumped into
Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford days) or had dinner in Washington with
Christopher Hitchens (as I did either on that trip to interview Billy Graham or another), I did not have to feel out on a limb. Hitchens was excited to greet a new convert to his non-creed and put me through a catechism before uncorking some stupendous claret. "So - absolutely no God?" "Nope," I was able to say with Moonie-zeal. "No future life, nothing 'out there'?" "No," I obediently replied. At last! I could join in the creed shared by so many (most?) of my intelligent contemporaries in the western world - that men and women are purely material beings (whatever that is supposed to mean), that "this is all there is" (ditto), that God, Jesus and religion are a load of baloney: and worse than that, the cause of much (no, come on, let yourself go), most (why stint yourself - go for it, man), all the trouble in the world, from Jerusalem to Belfast, from Washington to Islamabad.
My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced. My hilarious Camden Town neighbour Colin Haycraft, the boss of Duckworth and husband of
Alice Thomas Ellis, used to say, "I do wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn't go round calling himself an atheist. It implies he takes religion seriously."
This creed that religion can be despatched in a few brisk arguments (outlined in
David Hume's masterly
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and then laughed off kept me going for some years. When I found myself wavering, I would return to Hume in order to pull myself together, rather as a Catholic having doubts might return to the shrine of a particular saint to sustain them while the springs of faith ran dry.
But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers. Reading
Louis Fischer's
Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and following it up with
Gandhi's own autobiography,
The Story of My Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi's, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary
Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist "explanations" for our mysterious human existence simply won't do — on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist
Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: "It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names."
This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah's Ark. More so, really.
Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where's the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged
Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena ‒ of which love and music are the two strongest ‒ which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.
For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off
Thought for the Day when it comes on the radio. I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief "don't matter", that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.
When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion — prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.
I haven't mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler's neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read
Pastor Bonhoeffer's book
Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer's serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.
My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again.
Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God "a category mistake". Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the
Table Talk of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — "Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once... 'The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life'." And then Coleridge adds: "'And man became a living soul.' Materialism will never explain those last words."
Next step is an appraisal of Wilson's book JESUS, written in 1992 and reprinted several times...
THE FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR FACT
A N Wilson's Jesus shows how anyone combing the gospels
for history is likely to be disappointed
The
Jesus seminar is a group of scholars who have adopted a systematic approach to the search for the historical Jesus. Listing all the sayings and acts attributed to him, they colour code the likely veracity of each according to the standards of biblical criticism. For example, if the saying or act fits uneasily with subsequent Christian teaching, it's likely to be true, for only that could have stopped its suppression. One of these sayings is Jesus' injunction to turn the other cheek. An "inauthentic" saying is the beatitude he supposedly pronounced on those persecuted for following the Son of Man. The work has led the scholars to conclude that Jesus was an extraordinary ethical teacher, perhaps akin to Gandhi. It's an answer to the question of who this man was that A N Wilson, in his book
Jesus, utterly refutes.
It's not that what's recorded about him in the four gospels is not fascinating to search and weigh. Rather, it's that the ethical teaching is too muddled. Jesus has been read as a pacifist, as the saying about turning the other cheek might imply. And yet his disciples apparently carried swords in the Garden of Gethsemane. He taught that the poor would be blessed, though archaeological evidence suggests he lived for most of his life in a comfortable home. It just doesn't add up. "A patient and conscientious reading of the gospels will always destroy any explanation which we devise," Wilson writes. "If it makes sense, it's wrong."
His book is written in an open-minded, if questioning tone. He tests the evidence, whilst respecting the faith of ordinary Christians. His barbs are mostly saved for institutions like churches, who have consistently shown "contempt" towards what their supposed founder reportedly said. Some allow divorce, when Jesus is almost certain to have forbidden it. Others claim Jesus as their founder, when the fact that he didn't present his teachings in anything like a systematic form, but rather engaged with existing Jewish teaching, implies otherwise. He seems to have regarded himself as an authoritative, reformist rabbi, with apocalyptic leanings. He almost certainly believed that a new kingdom was coming, one so imminent that his disciples could live by it already. Interestingly, the main sign of living in that kingdom was not good acts or right faith, but what we might call personal integrity. Wilson tells the Jewish story about the sinner who dies and is asked by God whether he kept the Torah, said his prayers, and was faithful to his wife. The sinner answers "no" on all counts. "Come into the kingdom," says God. "Why?" asks the man. "Because you told the truth," replies God.
In short, for Wilson, Jesus is a figure who trips everyone up. He disrupts.
The evangelists might have agreed that the Jesus seminar approach is wrong, as they too don't present him as particularly admirable.
Bertrand Russell said he could take some of Jesus' advice, such as not judging others so that you are not judged in return. What he could not stomach was his moral character: it's a monster who would condemn people to outer darkness. But, the gospels seem to say, you're asking the wrong question. Jesus is saviour; that's the message.
This becomes clear in the extraordinary details that are given about the last few hours of his life. That's exceptional for an historical figure, bar a handful, like
Socrates – though like Plato's dialogues, the gospels are clearly not supposed to be historical records. They're inconsistent in too many details. Instead, their intention might be called mythological.
The stories of the passion present Jesus as an archetype, Wilson proposes, one demanding a response. "It is precisely because we know so little of the trivial things in the story that we can respond so powerfully to the large things – to his silences, to his apparent forgiveness of his captors, to his loneliness, and to his suffering."
Compare that restraint with the account given by the novelist Anne Rice in her
Christ the Lord series. She fills in all the details. The result is a god-man oddity. Her Jesus alienates, unless you have already bought into the personality cult such documentary approaches appeal to, when every detail is welcomed like titbits in a celebrity magazine.
What about the resurrection? The first Easter Sunday is treated as verifiable history by many theologians, even in liberal churches. It is the scientific proof of the gospel. Wilson does not follow that line. Efforts to find out "what really happened" are wisely abandoned, he avers. The evangelists are writing out of faith. They seek no proof, but rather to inhabit what they believe. Some details probably carry echoes of otherwise lost events, such as the role some women played in establishing the new faith. But to treat the gospels as objective is just to miss their point. "Subjectivity is the only criterion of gospel truth," Wilson writes.
Paul understood this. His encounter with Jesus is conveyed in terms of visionary experiences. He doesn't bother with evidence, or say his faith stands or falls on the existence of an empty tomb, Wilson points out. It's the living Christ that counts for him – the subjective experience. As the existentialist theologian
Paul Tillich observed, if the crucifixion was an event that became a symbol, the resurrection was a symbol that became an event.
For Wilson himself, at least at the
time he wrote this book, Jesus died a broken man. "My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?" he cried out on the cross, one of those embarrassing and so authentic sayings. He's a tragic figure, not a saviour – a man whose animating personality is as hidden as thoroughly as that of
Shakespeare.
Finally a tribute to the Bible as a book for all ages, a way of approaching an ineffable truth, a mythology of human imagination...
The Book of the People:
How to Read the Bible
AN Wilson’s tribute to the Bible – and to a late acquaintance –
is an erudite pleasure but suffers from a muddled narrative
This is a two-for-the-price-of-one book. The real prize within its covers is an erudite, elegant and quietly impassioned plea from
A N Wilson for us all, believers or not, to read the Bible more. The modern generation is missing out, he says, on the magnificence of its prose, the power of the stories it tells, and its extraordinary track record for inspiring the best and worst of human endeavours.
But included in there, too, is a distracting, half-formed eulogy to a shadowy would-be biblical scholar, a “sad gypsy”, more an acquaintance than a friend of Wilson’s, referred to only as “L”, who led an unhappy life and died prematurely and unfulfilled.
What links the two parts is the fact that “L” had spent decades researching and obsessing over, but never quite writing a book on, the relationship between the Bible and its readers. When she died the notes that she had stored inside her own Bible were given to Wilson. It was the spur for him to take on her subject, in part as a kind of tribute to her.
But his approach is so very different from what she had planned. This is not your standard academic’s tome on the Bible. Indeed, Wilson’s contention is that most scholarly approaches to the Bible are a dead end. He dismisses the “archaeological” school, forever searching after historical proof that what it reports actually took place. The Bible is something more interesting than history, he insists.
And he is equally impatient with those in the opposite camp who say that it may be the greatest story ever told, but it is a story nonetheless, written by different authors, over the course of thousands of years.
The truth, he suspects, lies somewhere in between. “L” preferred to see the books of the Bible as a kind of poetry, a way of approaching an ineffable truth, and so Wilson embarks on a journey around a number of his favourite texts to probe her thesis.
He begins with “wisdom” books of the Old Testament, or Hebrew scriptures, and to assist him in assessing their importance in the history of humankind, he heads off on a pilgrimage to
Hagia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom”, the great church commissioned in Constantinople by the
Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, then the largest building in the world, later a mosque and now a museum. Wilson proves a beguiling travel writer, but the relevance of what he is describing to understanding the enduring power over the human imagination of the texts he is examining remains opaque.
Arguably, he has a clearer focus when he turns specifically to the Book of Job, with its dramatic tale of the trials and tribulations of God’s faithful servant, pushed to the limits of endurance by Satan. Job is, Wilson proposes, “one of the biblical books which is also a stupendous work of literature… in which Hebrew poetry is never more hauntingly musical or sad”. He made me want to read it again.
Next, he bathes in the Book of Psalms, marvelling at their “raw truthfulness”, but quickly gets diverted into chronicling their influence on the poetry of the 17th-century priest
George Herbert. And that is the big problem with this book. Just as Wilson is poised to get down to a truly compelling analysis of a particular section of the Bible, or its historical significance, he is too easily distracted, either by another anecdote about the enigmatic “L”, or a beautifully evoked trip to illustrate a point he hasn’t yet quite made.
It undoubtedly makes for an easy, pleasurable read, but it is also a muddle. Perhaps it comes down to Wilson’s own on-off relationship with religion, which is never really addressed in the book. In his youth, he studied for the Anglican priesthood. Later, he wrote an angry pamphlet,
Against Religion, but in more recent years, he has spoken publicly of a return to Christianity.
Yet when he visits the nuns who cared for “L” in her last days, and they invite him to join in their liturgy, he starts to say: “I don’t…” but never completes the thought. And that’s the way, I’m afraid, with far too much of
The Book of the People.
See also the following pages:
For almost as long as the physical sciences have made their claims, poets and philosophers have observed that there is something inhuman about the undertaking they represent. They are right. We gain purchase on the physical world first by stripping it to its simplest form, and second by emptying it of its emotional content. Whatever the elementary particles may be doing, they are not forming political alliances, or looking on one another with mute incoherent longing, or casting an anxious eye on the clock, or waking with a start in the early hours of the morning, wondering what it all means, or coming to realize that they are destined to fall like leaves of the trees leaving not a trace behind.
